As someone who mostly blogs about women in history and art, I’m often asked which famous female figures from the past I find the most inspirational. It’s a tough question really as my answer can vary wildly depending on what sort of mood I’m in, the colour of my hair or just what sort of day I happen to be having. However, there are some constants and at the top of the list there is pretty much always Sophie Scholl.
I’ve tried to write this post so many times but always end up deleting it as I just don’t think that I can do Sophie and her associates in the White Rose group justice with mere words alone. However, on this day, the 69th anniversary of her execution by the Nazis on the 22nd of February 1943, I am going to take a moment to remember her here and recall her to the minds of everyone else who reads this.
Sophie Scholl was just twenty two years old when she was guillotined in the Stadelheim Prison in Munich and yet in the course of her short life she taught us all a lesson about having the courage to take action and show resistance in the face of an oppressive regime and having the resolution to stand up and try to make a difference despite having the odds stacked against you. As Sophie herself said at her trial: ‘Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.‘
Sophie was arrested with her brother, Hans, their friend Christoph Probst and other members of the White Rose movement after she was seen distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, suggesting a passive and intellectual resistance to Hitler at the University of Munich, even climbing to the top of the atrium and throwing them into the air.
‘I ask you, you as a Christian wrestling for the preservation of your greatest treasure, whether you hesitate, whether you incline toward intrigue, calculation, or procrastination in the hope that someone else will raise his arm in your defence? Has God not given you the strength, the will to fight? We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.‘ — text from the fourth White Rose pamphlet.
After the execution of the key members of the White Rose, their sixth and final pamphlet was smuggled out of Germany, copied by the Allies and then dropped in their millions by plane all over Germany where they would be read by and give hope to thousands of their fellow Germans, the forgotten silent majority who recognised the intrinsic vileness and evil of Hitler and the Nazis and were too afraid to stand up against it.
‘The German people are in ferment. Will we continue to entrust the fate of our armies to a dilettante? Do we want to sacrifice the rest of German youth to the base ambitions of a Party clique? No, never! The day of reckoning has come – the reckoning of German youth with the most abominable tyrant our people have ever been forced to endure. In the name of German youth we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way.‘ — text from the sixth White Rose pamphlet, the rest of which can be read here.
I’ve thought a lot about Sophie Scholl lately as my own country ferments in protest against a government who seem intent on increasing the divide between rich and poor and striking at the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. I think about her when I find myself muttering impotently on Twitter or rolling my eyes over dinner about how awful it all is and how frightened we all are about the future and I wonder, what would Sophie Scholl do?
‘How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?‘ — Sophie Scholl’s last words before her execution.
